As a young child, I had an English teacher who was obsessed with what she called, "the verb words," because they were active and led to more and more action in writing.  She used to make us stand up and act out all the verb words in our papers when we read them to the class.  I liked the writing part of that class, but the acting out "verb word" madness not so much.  I was the fat kid, you understand.  But what I did take away from that teacher is the importance of action, not only in our writing but also in our doing.

Thanksgiving is next week and what have you done to shine your community spotlight on this holiday? It's traditionally a day of family and football for many of us, so how can we make our residents feel like family today?  A few of the great retention ideas I've heard out there are:

Sending handwritten notes to residents telling them that you're thankful for their residency at your community and mentioning a specific way they make it better

Preparing and serving a GIANT Thanksgiving dinner for the residents

A step up on plain jane thank you cards, one community is sponsoring a float in their local day after Thanksgiving parade with a giant thank you to their residents on the side of it

Those are just some of the great ideas I've heard tossed around this week!  The float one has me really excited and I don't even like parades that much!

Another great way to "verb word" your Thanksgiving is through community outreach.  We are thankful for that big bird in front of us, but there are soldiers, sailors, marines, and flyboys far from home who don't have what we do right now.  They gave up their turkey with fixings so that we can enjoy ours in relative safety.  It takes a special level of dedication and commitment to be a part of the armed forces lifestyle, and that's definitely something that can be celebrated and is worthy of note.

Cell Phones for Soldiers is a great program that gives these folks a chance to call their families just a little more often and helps them feel connected with home, something we all ache for around the holiday season.  Another great perk is that by recycling old cell phones, they don't get thrown away in to the landfills as high tech trash.  Anything that can keep you, in Seattle, in touch with your grandma, in Florida, without any wires probably contains something that isn't going to be good for any of us if it seeps in to the groundwater.

Another great way for outreach at this time of year is to partner with a local food bank, shelter, or even your local branch of Toys for Tots.  These foundations help more people who don't have a bird in front of them and can do a lot of great things for families, singles, kids, & whoever in your community.  Sometimes, it seems we just set the box in the lobby and hope that it will fill itself up by magic.  We might send out a flier or email (or a twitter message once a day if we're REALLY on the ball) but we don't promote these sorts of things as well as we could.  A better approach to this might be to run a drive twice a year instead of just once and to use some, what I like to call, butt-end marketing.    Get your residents permission when they donate to publish a thank you to them, and then take a column out of your monthly newsletter and thank everyone who donated to the cause.  Social pressure says that the next time you do a drive, you'll have a lot more donations come in because, "everyone's doing it," and no one wants to look like a Scrooge.

Mindy Williams over at Rent and Retain had even another direction on "verb wording" your Thanksgiving.  In the Nov/Dec edition, she suggests the following:

On a poster board list all the great things that you are thankful for.  Here is an example: "I'm thankful for the drippy faucet that we recently fixed in apt. 2A.  As soon as the problem was brought to our attention we responded and had it fixed in less than 5 hours.  We are thankful we were able to provide such great customer service while saving water at the same time!"

Not only is this a great way to get your team in the thankful mindset, but it's also an awesome way to recognize accomplishments of your team and focus on the 99 great things that day instead of the 1 horrible thing.  Or, some days, the 1 thing that went right in a day of 99 mistakes.  Focusing on the positive of the day with a attitude of gratitude means good vibes will flow through your team and out to your residents, and the kind of retention and positive PR you can get from that can't be purchased with marketing dollars.

How will you and your team "verb word" Thanksgiving this year?

 

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Each winter, we watch our residents disappear in to their homes, where they hibernate all winter long, with little or no contact to the outside world.  Then in the spring, they come out and if  they see their shadows, we have 6 more weeks of winter.

Wait.  That's groundhogs.

But our residents are a lot like that if you don't count the whole 6 weeks more of winter thing.  They close off in the grey blah of the winter months, and as they hermit themselves away, we miss golden opportunities for resident retention.

As I've stated before, you don't have to have a lot of money to do resident retention, since the most important factor is the level of service that we put forth as property management professionals.  But if you've already got the Ritz Carlton service going, why not max your retention score by going above and beyond to brighten up your residents days in the gloomy months of grey skies? (You can tell I'm in Seattle.  We have grey skies for three months of the year up here, minimum.)

Resident groups are always a popular idea, IF you pick the right things to build your groups on.  If you're working in a university district, quilting is probably not going to be a popular topic, but Scrapbooking might.  You can find local stores, especially in this economy,  who would be willing to either reduce their prices on supplies or even donate some to your community.  And, as an avid scrapbooker myself, I'll tell you right now that odds are in your favor that your residents already have a lot of supplies themselves.

Another great U-District group option is offering space two or three nights a week for resident study groups where people can meet and socialize while they do homework.  The best part about this is that when you've got a good study group, people want to join, and this might include people who are not your residents.  NOT YET your residents.  Put out some coffee and packets of hot cocoa, and watch the chairs and tables fill up in your function space. 

This idea is equally well implemented in communities where you have a lot of school aged children as an after school study group one or two days a week.  How great would it be to contact your local high school's sponsor of the National Honor Society and ask them if they have any kids who would want to volunteer as tutors?!  NHS kids have to have a certain number of volunteer hours and tutoring is right up their alley.  Plus, you get to provide a valuable service to the parents in your community at low to no cost, which will go over big since, out on the west coast at least, good tutors can run upwards of $75 an hour.

At a senior community, knitting circles are always a popular draw.  It's a chance to gather and gab with others and a chance for people to teach each other and pass on knowledge.  Cross-Stitch is another popular circle to start since patterns can be recycled and reused several times, reducing the overall cost.  Some businesses like Daniel Smith Artist Supplies will occasionally partner with communities that want to offer time to art groups where residents can learn drawing, painting and other art forms.

Hosting a professionals networking night could be both a lot of fun and very rewarding for your residents, not to mention it's a great opportunity for them to meet their neighbors.

Monthly Movie Nights might be a great way to get use out of that on site media room. You could hold a "Date Nite" move or a "Sunday Afternoon Matinée" for the kids in your community.  Setting a movie schedule by the current new releases is a great idea or asking for suggestions from your residents works really well, too.  Once you have established your movie routine, you can start holding Movie Marathons with series like Lord of the Rings, Superman, Batman, Star Wars, Harry Potter, The wonderful world of Disney, Star Trek,  etc. on your weekends.  It looks great to new future residents to see amenities getting use and it's a great treat for your current residents, plus the cost of popcorn isn't too high that it will blow out your budget!  Plus IMDB gives you a great resource to make sure that the movies you're showing are appropriate to your audience.

Go from low cost to NO cost with a Bi-weekly Book Club! You can involve your local libraries in the process, and if I know anything about librarians (and having been raised by one, I DO) they will be excited to facilitate to the best they can.  In King county we have a phenomenal library system where you can order your books on line and have them sent to the branch nearest to you.  For novels, there would most likely be enough in the system for your group to check out and read every two weeks.  Also, according to recent trends reports, reading is on the rise in the American public, if for no other reason than the fact that it's free!

What about holding a weekly Game Night?  You can acquire cheaper games from your local thrift stores like the Salvation Army or Goodwill, or you can invite your residents to bring their own games.  There are several great games you can play with just a few decks of cards, which is of minimal cost to your community. Skip-Bo, Uno, and Rook are great card games to add to your collection as well.  An at-home version Pictionary is easy enough to create for a cost of one large pad of news print, markers and some scraps of paper.  If you have the funds to buy some games for your community, don't pass up the following:
Cranium
Cranium WOW
Catch Phrase
Outburst
Taboo
Scattergories
Apples to Apples
These are all fantastic party games to have in your cabinet and they encourage people to get excited and involved.  It's hard to sit by and not get sucked in to a game of Outburst or Catch Phrase, and Cranium is absolutely irresistible!

If you're looking for more ideas, check out www.Meetup.com for some great inspiration, and even some existing local groups.  Do you host groups for your residents?  How successful has it been for your communities?

 

 

I'm a hippie at heart.  In third grade, I decided that ecology was cool and have pretty much been hooked on saving the dolphins and trees ever since.  I didn't know it was science until I was way too far sucked in to decide it was too hard to understand.  Science is sneaky that way.  But, to me, dolphins and trees are totally worth it.

You've got $11 in your community budget for this one!

The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet one Simple Step at a Time


No doubt you already know that going green is a great trend in multi-family housing, as it is in most industries.  The planet isn't going to last forever, and it seems that the grand majority of Americans out there are finally understanding this.  Maybe it's that I live in hippie central up here in Seattle, but there's just no disputing that tree hugging is in.  It makes people feel good, and now anyone can be "green" without wearing itchy burlap or eating a bunch of tofu.

For apartments though, it can seem complicated.  Building "green" doesn't pay off for about 20 years.  Changing out your community's windows runs in the thousands of dollars.  Compact florescent light bulbs don't have the same immediate brightness that you get with incandescents which can lead to a poor presentation of the home, and the bulbs, while they last for up to 7 years, are definitely not the cheapest to implement community wide.

All that said, people are basing buying decisions on eco-friendliness.  If they weren't, those reusable shopping bags that every store has branded now wouldn't be so danged popular (and did you read Lisa Trosien's post on those?  It's not a good idea... it's a darned outstanding idea!), and $5 a light bulb wouldn't sound reasonable.  If you can afford to retrofit for a greener world then you should try it.  If you're building new, then build green, because what might take a while in profits will pay of huge in the court of public opinion and when it comes to getting leases, that's all that matters.  People need to feel that warm fuzzy from doing good by Mother Earth, and they need your marketing to give it to them.

So what is your average hippie-at-heart apartment management professional to do?  How about your die hard republican, gotta-make-money-in-this-market kind of manager?

Well, either way, you'd better get yourself a copy of The Green Book.  It's an easy read, only 224 pages, and those pages are packed with ideas and implementations from celebrities.  The book is full of great fun facts that you can use for your newsletters and could spark some new ideas for resident retention, such as community libraries (see my post later this week!!!), barter boards, or providing a drop off point for some hard to recycle items like cell phones and computer hardware (If you want some more great recycling tips for hard to dispose of items, check out the September and October issues of Real Simple magazine.  They had an awesome two part article on recycling from A to Z!).  It's a book loaded with great multi-family idea springboards!  Best of all, a good majority of the solutions in the book cost little to nothing to implement and are still a noticeable, and marketable, change in your community!

Go buy The Green Book. It probably costs less than you spent on that latte and your lunch.  Actually, buy a copy of it used on line or from half price books. It's even more eco-friendly that way.  Reused AND printed on recycled paper!  Probably with soybean based inks!  I love it!!!

What have you done in your communities to Go Green?

 

 

In the September/October edition of Rent And Retain, Mindy Williams answered a letter concerned with the recent economic downturn and how it relates to presenting an apartment community.  She said that it's about the total package.

I loved this thought.  It's not about just your community, it's about the whole community.  Do you know where the best Asian food in town is?  How about the dry cleaners with the best prices?  And where can I find a Baskin Robbins?  How about a Dunkin' Donuts? (If you can find me one of those and a Sonic in the Seattle area, I will swear undying allegiance and love to you.  Sure we get the commercials, but where's the product?!)

You've got to be a "Concierge Lite" for your future residents before they even move in.  The good information about a potential community is worth more than gold to a new resident, and if you can find a great connection in knowledge with your future resident then you've got an increased chance of closing that lease!

Here's a few other overlooked nuggets you might want to try to find out:

Doggie Day Care - Pets are family members and being a pet friendly community gives you some great chances for real connections with your residents

Local Senior Center - Old people rock!  There, I said it.  They are just too cool, and if you've got a diverse community, then this a pretty standard question.  Don't look at them like they're crazy.  Know where the Senior Center with the craft room and free pool tables is. 

The best Mexican place in town-  This is a must know for all leasing consultants along with the best local pizza joint.  They are always the two most requested food genres.

A good priced, and great skilled, local hair stylist - Finding a new stylist is one of those things that we don't think about when we move, but is always a pain in the tush afterward.  Help your new resident out by referring them to someone who knows what they're doing. It's one less thing they have to try to find.

The nearest place they can find a toaster - I have lost and/or broken mine twice in the moving process, and the minute I find it broken, I immediately want bagels. 

What else belongs on this list?  What are you most often asked for?  When you move, what do you want to know right off the bat?

 

 

I will take the time to write a longer "how to" and "why should I" blog in a few days, but I wanted to throw this nugget of information out:  When you make a new blog post on Multifamily Insiders, it gets shown to Technorati, a blog search engine!  It takes a look at the tags you use (see the link on the right side of the blog-writer window) and indexes your blogs.  I won't get into the nuts and bolts, but basically, it helps with your "web presence" by giving you better search results for the things you talk about, namely your company or brand!  I'll talk more about this later on, but just trust me that it is a very good thing!

We let our residents paint their apartments.  We even offer to do it for them as a move-in incentive or for a small fee per wall.  This really helps for them to personalize their space and make it feel like home.  We want them to enjoy their living experience at J.C. Hart, and coming home to an apartment that has a personal touch and some color can help them to do so.

 At J.C. Hart we work with a number of vendors for paint and painting.  One in particular is CertaPro painters.  They have franchises across the U.S. and have a great website.  Check out Kristen's Fall Color palatte here.

For you leaders out there, how many times have you thought to yourself, " I wonder what the team thinks of my ability to lead?" "I wonder if they think I am doing a good job?"

I am pondering a piece on leadership feedback and would like to hear your thoughts. Drop me a quick comment [here] if you have time today and we will see what comes of it.